Friday, August 31, 2012

"I don't know why all this shit about wanting to hear about the football all the time..."from Infinite Jest

It's hard to comprehend for the old-timers. Why a team from Alabama would want to play a team from Michigan in Texas. And not just any Texas either, but Dallas, Texas. Maybe the most Texasy part of Texas.

To tell them that doing so is for the benefit of sportswriters in New York and high school students in Ohio and California makes even less sense to them. But here's the key to understanding college football in the 21st c.: the less sense it makes, the closer you are to understanding it. Thankfully, Cowboys Stadium, the so-called JerryDome, is a perfect place for not making sense of things.

Inside Jerry's World, you can pay around a hundred bucks to not have seat for this game, which is a great deal when you consider that most of the people in those seats will be watching the giant television over the game, rather than the game itself. Try explaining that to the old-timers.

Or don't. It's just another reminder that things have passed them by.

Many of them have spent the past week watching the wrong channels on your own, less-than-giant tee-vees, believing all that stands between them and their own JerryDome is Rowdy Yates kicking over a chair and that the interstate highway system was built by, I don't know, elves dressed like Ayn Rand.

Also, I have become exhausted fielding the hubris of "Michigan Men" et al., especially when they are touting their marquee QB as panacea for a roster of asterisks and question marks. Make no mistake: Denard Robinson is a special player. He is fast. He is elusive. He is surprising. He makes lots of things happen. Hell, he may be the Higgs boson--God knows he's about as tiny.

And there's but one of those asterisks.

It's rare that an Alabama partisan looks across the field and tells the opposition to get with the times, but I, like Las Vegas, am growing comfortable in the Great Leader's polite, violent nihilism--a showcase of muscled and stifling calculus.

This is not romance: this is football as asphyxiation. From Alabama's perspective, goals are now irrelevant. The world is not enough, and there are no more Alexanders left to conquer.